“I still feel like a bum,” he said, laughing, when asked how his early experiences in San Diego had affected him.

Baldessari is a first-generation American whose Italian family settled in National City. His father engaged in a wide range of enterprises — “anything to make money,” Baldessari said. When the son showed artistic inclinations as early as elementary school (where he won his first art prize), the father was dismissive.

“I can’t denigrate him,” Baldessari said. “The best job he ever had … was working as a postman in Italy. He got room and board, a new pair of shoes every year, and that was it. Things could only get better. Somehow he got money, got to Genoa, got to New York (and then by way of Colorado, to National City). So of course, you have to make money.

“An artist? That’s not going to make you money.

“I knew it was not my father’s wishes, and I knew I was a big disappointment.”

Baldessari attended Sweetwater High School and was the rare graduate who continued on to San Diego State, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art (he figures he was one of “about seven” students from National City at SDSU). He spent much of his 20s teaching and making paintings in an old, abandoned theater in Lincoln Hills his father had bought just before the movie business went bust.

“I was in this movie theater, working in one corner and with all this space, and in a few years, I had pretty much filled that with paintings,” he said. “And I thought, ‘OK, I’m in my early 30s, nobody is watching what I do, nobody cares, I’m going to be here the rest of my life, and I’m going to be inundated with paintings.’

“And why? The joy in painting is doing it. I have a photographic record of it. Why do I have to own it? There’s no reason.”

He was thinking of a way of “atomizing” the paintings down to their essence when he came up with a plan that might have been his first piece of conceptual art, had he carried it out.

“My first thing was right out of James Bond,” he said. “I’ll photograph (the paintings), make microdots, put them under postage stamps, and mail letters to my friends. Then I thought, that’s kind of labor intensive.”

Instead, he decided to take his paintings to a crematorium, ceremoniously burned them, and put the ashes in a container, which itself is an art work (it was part of the “Pure Beauty” retrospective).

“I look back now and I think I must have been out of my mind,” Baldessari said. “But it made complete sense at the time.”

Changing the context

Influenced by composer John Cage — whom he encountered when he later taught at the University of California San Diego and met again when he started teaching at the California Institute of the Arts — Baldessari had been thinking about what constitutes a painting, and what constitutes a piece of art.